Trust Your Choir Conductor

As a choir member you have to trust your choir conductor. Imagine yourself in a strange and foreign landscape. Without a map, compass, satnav, travel guide, or signposts. There’s no doubt. You are lost.

It’s a lonely and uncomfortable feeling. Strange as it seems, it can happen in a choir.

This feeling can overcome you at any time. Particularly vulnerable moments are when learning a new piece of music.

The complexity of a piece can also leave you clutching at crotchets. Or just grasping for inspiration.

Fear not, help is at hand. In the form of the choir conductor.

Guidance through a complicated passage is conveyed with a mere  supportive look. Or a comforting hand gesture.

Being part of a choir is a discipline. You are, after all, only a small part of a large group that is rehearsed by the choir conductor.

A choir learns the musical cohesion required to appear in front of a paying audience.

It’s the ‘practice that makes perfect’ that also applies in choral activity.

Trust Your Choir Conductor

When you join a choir, you have to trust the conductor. He/she is more than capable to lead the choir through difficult and complicated passages.

As you encounter difficult passages of music and come through unscathed. You begin to trust your choir conductor more and more.

Choir conductors are rather like leaders of expeditions. They know how to read the map.  And what to do if you lose your way.

There are obvious qualities, the tools of the trade, to become a successful conductor.

Patience

Maybe this is the most important quality, especially with a community choir. Learning new songs to performance/concert standard takes time.

Not everyone reads music. Extreme patience is a must to take each section, through their respective notes. Over and over again, until it becomes familiar.

Enthusiasm

It’s stating the obvious. But a good choir conductor needs to have an enthusiasm for choral singing, and for music in general. They need a strong sense of musicality.

Sense of Humour

A successful choir conductor must have an excellent sense of humour. Also, a good relationship with the accompanist is necessary. It will encourage and maintain an atmosphere of enjoyment in rehearsal and in performance.

Besides the singing, people join a choir because they want to enjoy themselves. In the friendship and camaraderie of other choristers.

As shown above, a good choir conductor will always make it happen. Does that sound good?

Why don’t you come along and give it a try?